Benoit POSTE wrote:
As root: 'rcnamed status' should tell you whether or not DNS is running. You don't necessarily need to set up DNS on you Linux box - you could always just feed Windows the IP addresses of your ISPs nameservers. Windows would then contact your ISPs DNS servers directly, rather than speaking to the Linux box, which then speaks to the ISPs DNS servers and passes the result back to the Windows box. Follow that? ;-)
I think I did. I hope I did. Now there's still one thing that had me wonder to no end. When connecting directly to the internet (whether on the linux box or the win98 box), there is absolutely no need to set up the DNS (manually at least) and everything works like a charm. But when I connect with the Win98 through the Linux gateway/router, it looks like I must set the DNS, either in the win98 or in the linux box. Why is that so? Isn't there such a thing as "auto DNS forwarding" or something?
When you dial up, your ISP will assign you an IP address automatically using a protocol known as DHCP. Using DHCP, it is possible to specify more than just an IP address - many ISPs also provide their default gateway and DNS servers in this way. When either Windows or Linux dials up, the computer that dials up is given all the information it needs (IP address, default gateway, and DNS servers). When you try to connect your Windows box through your Linux box, it is the Linux box that receives all this information from your ISP - the Windows box receives nothing. The solutions to this are those that I've already mentioned - either you manually tell Windows the IP addresses of the DNS servers, or you set up DNS on your Linux box. Setting up DNS on your Linux box means that instead of pointing at your ISPs DNS servers, you can point Windows at your Linux box as a DNS server.
If 'rcnamed status' doesn't return "OK", then you can try to restart the DNS server with 'rcnamed restart'. The relevant variable in /etc/rc.config is, I think, START_NAMED, and it should be set to "yes".
One other thing that you will need to do, is to edit /etc/named.conf. Find the options section towards the start of the file. Within the options section, you want the forwarders subsection. Inside the forwarders subsection, you need to put the IP addresses of your ISPs DNS servers (comment out the ones already there, if they're not already commented out). Once you've edited the configuration file, restart the server as before. Then try pinging google.com or some other high-profile host.
Another step along the path to understanding ;-) Chris -- __ _ -o)/ / (_)__ __ ____ __ Chris Reeves /\\ /__/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / ICQ# 22219005 _\_v __/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\